Tombstone epitaph., 1887-12-24
ON A KENTUCKY FARM.
Associations of Ante-Bellum Boyhood
 ''Mammy," the Cook, "Uncle Tom.''

Associations of Ante-Bellum Boyhood.
 ''Mammy." the Cook, ''Uncle Tom.''
 The typical boy on a Kentucky farm was tenderly associated from infancy with the negroes of the household and the fields. His old black "mammy'' became almost his first mother and was but slowly crowded out of his conscience and his heart by the growing image of the true one. She had perhaps nursed him at her bosom when he was not long enough to stretch across 1t, sung over his cradle at noon and at midnight, taken him out upon the velvety grass beneath the shade of the elm trees to watch his first manly resolution of standing alone in the world and walking the vast dis. tance of some inches. Often in boyish years when flying from the house with a loud appeal from the incomprehensible code of AnglO-Saxon punishment for small misdemeanors he had run to those black arms and cried himself to sleep in the lap of African sympathy. As he grew older, alasi his first love grew faith less, and while "mammy' was good enough in her way and sphere his wander ing affections settled humbly at the feet of another great functionary of the house. hold-the cook in the kitchen. To him her keys were as the keys to the kingdom of heaven, for his immortal soul was his immortal appetite. When he stood by the biscuit bench while she, pausing amid the varied industries that went into the preparation of an old time Kentucky supper, made him marvellous geese of dough, with farinaceous feathers and genuine coffee grains for eyes, there was to him no other artist in the world who possessed the secret of so commingling the useful with the beautiful
 The little half naked imps, too, playing In the dirt like glossy blackbirds taking ( bath of dust, were his sweetest-because, perhaps, forbidden--companions. With them he went clandestinely to the fatal duck pond in the stable lot, to learn the art of swimming on walnut rail With them he raced up and down the lane on blooded alder stalk horses, afterward leading the exhausted coursers into stables of the same green bushes and haltering them high with . cotton string. It was one of these hatless children of original Guinea that had crept up to him as he lay asleep In the summer grass and told him where the best hidden of all nests was to be found in far fence corner--that of the high tempered, scolding guinea hen. To them he showed his first Barlow knife: for them he blew his first home made whistle. He is their petty tyrant today; tomorrow he will be their repentant friend, dividing with them his marbles and proposing Q game of hop scotch. Upon his dialect, his disposition, his whole character, is laid the ineffaceable impress of theirs, co that they pass into the final reckoning up of his life here and in the world to come.
 But Uncle Tom-the negro overseer of the place-the greatest of all the negroes greater even than the cook, when one is not hungry. How often has he strad- dl9d Uncle Toms neck, or ridden behind bm af1eld on barebacked horse to tho Angling music of the trace chainsl It is Uncle Tom who brings him his first young squirrel to tame, the teeth of which are soon to be planted in his right forefnger. Many time he slips out of the house to take his dinner or supper in the cabin with Uncle Tom; and during long winter evenings he loves to sit before those great roaring cabin 6replaces that throw their red and yellow lights over the half circle ef black faces and on the mysteries of broom making, chair bottoming and tho cobbling of shoes. Like the child who listens to "Uncle Remus," he too hears songs and stories, and creeps back to the house with wondering look in his eyes and vague hush of spirit.-James Lane Allen in The Century.